‘Dark Emu’ Is Being Used As Bait For The Culture Wars Again
Two academics are releasing a new book to 'debunk' Pascoe's popular text.
Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe has again had his popular book Dark Emu challenged by academics, apparently over the quality of evidence used.
On Saturday, archaeologist Keryn Walshe and anthropologist Peter Sutton were interviewed in Good Weekend for an upcoming release — a counter-argument which aims to rebut Pascoe’s 2014 text.
Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Black Seeds — Agriculture or Accident? shifts preconceived narratives of Indigenous communities pre-colonialism. In it, Pascoe says that Indigenous people weren’t “hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers” but instead had sophisticated agricultural, textile, and construction systems.
The crux of the animosity towards Dark Emu is the white man’s burden… Australia is committed to the premise that Aboriginal people are primitive and white people are civilising us for our own good.
— Pearson In The Wind (@LukeLPearson) June 12, 2021
The recent Good Weekend article, titled ‘Debunking Dark Emu: did the publishing phenomenon get it wrong?’ spruiks Sutton and Walshe’s new book, where they claim Dark Emu is a “lack of true scholarship” that cherrypicks and fabricates information.
Both academics maintain that First Nations people were hunters, gathers, and fishers, but that there is nothing ‘simple’ or ‘primitive’ about their labour practices, a book review on Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate said.
The shark-jumping Good Weekend attempt to take down Dark Emu commits a very common journalistic error—seeing the contention of ideas, usually within academia, as failure and scandal. As usual, this country cannot have a mature intellectual culture of frank, energetic discourse.
— Lauren Carroll Harris (@DrLaurenCH) June 12, 2021
In a response published in Good Weekend, Pascoe wrote that his book has “encouraged many Australians to recognise the ingenuity and sophistication of many Aboriginal cultures, societies and land-management practices.”
“Hunter-gatherer and farmer are both settler/colonial labels, and the long prevailing negative interpretation of hunter-gatherer has been used as a weapon against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (as a justification for terra nullius),” the Yuin and Bunurong man said.
Indigenous responses to the recent debate highlight this stance — that the conversation dances around a narrow, imposed lens that distracts from the potential to unlearn what Australians have been taught for centuries without question.
It delves into the basic principle of historiography that the past is not unmediated, but rather constructed with agendas, and always has the potential for re-interpretation.
“I speak to so many Australians, both black and white, who say the book changed their lives,” Pascoe said to The Wire in 2018.
2 White Academics putting all that effort into debunking Dark Emu but no effort into debunking the Colonial lies that then led to this country being INVADED? that has them squatting this day! on unceded Sovereign First Nations lands..lol wow ok 🙄
— Elizabeth Wymarra (@woollogirl) June 12, 2021
While presentations like Walshe and Sutton’s are steeped in research, many use the book as an easy grab to shut down Indigenous voices. Dark Emu has steadily provoked outrage since its release seven years ago as a go-to target for conservatives.
The conversation was predictably picked up by commentator Andrew Bolt, who called Pascoe’s work a ‘fraud’, in an ongoing vendetta against Pascoe. Last year, Bolt slammed Schwartz Media’s The Monthly and the ABC for defending the “error-ridden” book.
A website titled ‘Dark Emu Exposed’ and an earlier book from 2019 titled Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, also exist.
Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge weighed in on Saturday as well. “The history curriculum needs to be balanced and based on well-understood facts,” Tudge said, in relation to Dark Emu being taught in classrooms. “As such, I don’t believe Dark Emu should be part of the curriculum unless it can be more widely validated.”
Pascoe’s work has been divisive within First Nations groups too. While he has a lot of support from the Indigenous community, the author had his roots questioned in 2020, when former Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton investigated a complaint by Warrimay businesswoman Josephine Cashman to challenge his Aboriginality.
the discourse around Bruce Pascoe & Dark Emu makes evident once again the price Indigenous people pay for using their voice
— naama (@derridalicious) June 14, 2021
In a second response after the Good Weekend feature was published, Pascoe encouraged more nuanced debate.
“We’re looking at the same facts and we’re having a difference of opinion about the facts. That’s not a bad thing. I think Aboriginal people have been wanting to have this discussion for 250 years, so I think it can only be positive.”